Jerry meets baseball player Keith Hernandez and strikes up a friendship with him. Kramer and Newman tell the story of Keith spitting on them. George schemes to stay on unemployment, first by making up a latex company called Vandelay Industries, then by dating the daughter of the woman working his unemployment case. Jerry and Kramer see their friends’ baby.

Written by: Larry David and Larry Levine
Directed by: Tom Cherones

Two-part episodes of sitcoms, much like double albums, imply a level of ambition that is very funny for a show about nothing. It does feel like this two-parter rises to the occasion, though. One of my favourite things about watching Seinfeld the first time was how it seemed to be constantly evolving and growing; we’ve already tracked the increasing complexity of the plotting and the way everything bounces off everything else, and we’re still very far away form iconic elements like George’s parents or Puddy. Very few sitcoms manage to evolve this way; Scrubs and Newsradio follow the typical pattern of levelling out in quality in their second season before going too goofy in their fifth, and The Simpsons was constantly evolving up until the descent into crap around season nine. This is the one respect in which Always Sunny not only matches its ascendant, but surpasses it; I’d argue that show is currently in its fourth era.

Anyway, returning to “The Boyfriend”, it’s not so much more ambitious as it just doing everything it already does, but at once and louder than ever. The central joke is even a redo of the same joke in “Male Unbonding” – treating a platonic friendship exactly like a romance, both creating an absurd set of situations in which platonic gestures are treated ridiculously seriously, and revealing how much of our platonic friendships are driven by these feelings and noting how there aren’t as many written or unwritten rules about the process.

It’s much funnier than “Male Unbonding” because it actually plays out the beats of a romantic relationship in a platonic context; the meet cute, the first date, the agonising over being called, and, of course, reaching Home base (helping him move). Now, one could argue that this is, if not outright homophobic, then at least hard to find too funny given that queer men date all the time and go through the same anxieties as everyone else, making what Jerry is going through banal. One would, of course, be wrong – it’s specifically the fact that this is platonic and Jerry is applying this logic to a simple friendship that makes it so funny.

In his standup, Jerry talks about how hard it is to make friends in your thirties, and this is an observation that not only has aged well, it’s a thought people seem to think we’ve only been having the last five or six years. When people talk about this ‘epidemic of loneliness’, I think it’s simply identifying something that’s been true since before the written word – it’s just the internet has given these lonely people a much bigger voice than they’ve ever had – instead of signing up for video dating or joining cults, they’re doing things like filming manifestos in a truck or publishing essays on thirty year old sitcom episodes. Things like Seinfeld remind us that these weirdos have always existed, always floated through our periphery.

And not only is this not the only idea of the episode, it’s not even the most iconic! I’ve battled underemployment my entire adult life, so I was disturbed at how much I understood George through this, even if I wouldn’t do what he does. What always gets me about George is how he makes the obvious, fatal mistake of trying to bury the targets of his lies under a hundred lies at once, as if his target only needs one more detail to be convinced (it kind of reminds me of Walter White’s lies in Breaking Bad). His semi-ruthless dedication to his goals is also incredibly funny; I love that he just accepts that the big guy and the taxi driver aren’t going to work out for him. It’s like George has an uncanny sense of when to relax and when to focus… just always at the exact wrong time.

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• This also has great examples of the show allowing callbacks; just offhand, I can think of Keith Hernandez randomly referring to George as a ‘chucker’, as well as George making the callback at the very end; Kramer dropping a baby and Keith Hernandez describing his fragile furniture as “like a baby”; my favourite, Jerry and George discussing the concept of sex with a tall woman only for one to show up at the end. Roger Ebert remarked that Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue was ‘load-bearing’, burying important plot details in casual conversation, and we have something like that happen here.
• This has a rare case of the characters remembering Jerry is famous within the story (“I’ve been on The Tonight Show!”).
• George infuriated in a phone booth is my favourite recurring image in the show (“Kramer! Nooooooo!”).
• There’s a video of all the references Seinfeld ever made, and my favourite part is the section alternating between JFK and its parody here. You even see the show misremembering the lines to be funnier – I love Jerry saying “The spit then splashed off the wrist, pauses – in midair, mind you,” with his finger in the air.

Biggest Laugh: This is a genuinely difficult one, considering the amount of iconic sequences.

Next Week: “The Limo”.